CITY ROOM; Child Star of '40s Ads for Sofa Beds Is Pulling Out a New Line

By JAMES BARRON

Published: June 12, 2012

-She did the demonstration in the front hall, where a hunter's trophy - a large antlered head mounted on a square of dark wood - once stared down from a landing above the stairs. Surely that animal would have recognized her as the girl from the sofa bed commercials of the 1940s. And the 1950s. And the 1960s.

-But by the time Bernadette Castro's father bought this Long Island mansion in the 1960s and brought in 15 Castro Convertibles, somebody had taken the animal head with the antlers away. The previous owner had been an air-conditioner tycoon, and all but one of his through-the-window machines had also disappeared.

The Castro Convertible that Ms. Castro, 67, pulled open was not one of the old ones. This was a convertible ottoman that opens into a single bed. She is reviving the brand that she made famous as a child on television, but without its own retail stores. She sold the original company in the 1990s, but the buyer has since gone out of business.

Now she is selling on the Internet and - where else? - on television, specifically on the Home Shopping Network, which did not exist when her father called Channel 5 and said he wanted to put a commercial on the air.

That was in the late 1940s, when television was tiny. There were fewer than 200,000 sets in the New York area at a time when newspaper circulation was setting records year after year. Television screens were tiny, too. Ms. Castro remembers watching a set so small, you could buy a giant magnifying glass to place over the screen.

It was in a place far different from this, with its 25 rooms and 13 bathrooms, give or take a few. ''We lived in a two-family house in the Bronx, around the Throgs Neck Bridge,'' she said, ''and my father had invented the dual-purpose sofa the way we know it today. The cement bench goes back to King Tut. My father got the idea when a woman brought in davenports. He said, 'I can make this beautiful, but I have to take out the bed.' She said, 'No, no, no.'''

And the television commercials?

-''This, I'm telling you secondhand,'' she said.

She was about 4 and it was a Sunday afternoon in the Bronx. ''I'm lying down on a Castro Convertible, watching TV,'' she said. ''My parents walked in and said, 'Who opened this? Did you open this?' It hadn't been open the last time they were in the room. Then my dad looked at me and said, 'Honey, did you open this?'''

Her father, Bernard, shooed her off the sofa, closed it and told her to open it. And she did.

He realized that television was the perfect medium to show that. But Ms. Castro remembers hearing that officials at Channel 5 were puzzled as to how they could broadcast a local commercial over and over. ''They finally said, 'Mr. Castro, go make a film, 16 millimeter. You bring it to us, we'll set it up.'''

-Some details have faded in her memory - where they filmed the commercial, for example. This much is certain: She did not go to Hollywood. ''I believe we filmed it in one of our showrooms,'' she said.

-But she acted like a star, demanding a star's perk: nail polish. This was noticed. ''Dorothy Kilgallen'' - a sharp-tongued celebrity columnist with The New York Journal American newspaper - ''wrote, 'Shame on you, you hired a midget. It's obvious from the nail polish that's not a real child.'''

-Ms. Castro said her father was thrilled with the attention, just as he was thrilled when Milton Berle and Jackie Gleason called, wanting to parody the commercials on their comedy shows. ''They said, 'Can we go out and hire a look-alike?''' she said. ''My father was so thrilled, he said yes. I remember watching it and thinking, 'Darn, I wish I were there.'''

-He had bought 13 weeks of commercials. ''In the 12th week, he said, 'This isn't working,''' she recalled. ''The 13th week, women started coming in and said, 'We want to see what the child opened.' And I became the most televised child in America.'' The commercial was shown some 40,000 times in various forms. It was one of the first local advertisements on television in New York. Some say it was the first to feature a child.

-She went on to record as a singer in the 1960s, and in 1994 she ran unsuccessfully as a Republican against Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. (She later agreed to pay a $22,000 fine for neglecting to file reports for $352,810 that she lent her campaign shortly before the election.) Gov. George E. Pataki named her commissioner of parks, recreation and historic preservation in 1995.

But the memories of those commercials never faded to black.

-''When I'd be at a state park and somebody would walk up with a big smile,'' she said, ''I could finish their sentence: 'Yep, I'm the little girl.' I was part of their life.''

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.

PHOTOS: Bernadette Castro, the daughter of the founder of Castro Convertibles, at home with her new product line of pullout ottomans, which are being sold online.; A 1970s oil painting, left, was used in a print ad. As a child, Ms. Castro appeared in a television spot, one of the first local commercials shown in the New York area. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY ULI SEIT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)